After the event, I will doing a book signing for my latest publication, "Atheists in the Mist: the death throes of non-belief". There will also be a dinner with yours truly with tickets starting at £20. So, what are you waiting for?

A few years back, I claimed that my own research showed that pigs were unlike their artiodactylan cousins and more like primates. I was riducled on this very site for making such a bold claim. I am pleased to my scientific peers have confirmed my findings.

We identified and characterized a free PRE-1 element inserted into the promoter region of the porcine IGFBP7 gene whose integration mechanisms into the genome, including copy number, distribution preferences, capacity to exonize and phyloclustering pattern are similar to that of the primate Alu element. 98% of these PRE-1 elements also contain two conserved internal AluI restriction enzyme recognition sites, and the RNA structure of PRE1 can be folded into a two arms model like the Alu RNA structure. It is more surprising that the length of the PRE-1 fragments is nearly the same in 20 chromosomes and positively correlated to its fracture site frequency. All of these fracture sites are close to the mutation hot spots of PRE-1 families, and most of these hot spots are located in the non-complementary fragile regions of the PRE-1 RNA structure. Sequence homology analysis showed that the PRE-1 element seemed to share a common ancestor 7SL RNA with primates but was generated by different evolutionary model, which suggests that the suidae may be the closest relatives to primates in laurasiatheria.

I am in the process of applying for a massive grant from the John Templeton Foundation to investigate whether proteins have been intelligently designed by an almighty creator. I would like to see if there are other foundations like Templeton which fund cutting-edge cross-disciplinary research. Any names?

I have long been asking my fellow scientists to get on with sequencing a giraffe and they finally have done so. The evolutionary enigma of how the giraffe got its unique physique apparently comes down to one fibroblast growth factor (FGFRL1) with 7 amino acid substitutions:

The chain of causality cannot stretch back indefinitely because of the following reasons:

1. If the universe had no beginning, then there would be no passage of time since the universe could never get any older.

2. If the past were "endless", the present could not exist since it represents the end of the past and the beginning of the future.

3. Following on from 2), it would also take forever to reach the present moment if there was no beginning.

4. If motion represents "displacement in space-time", then this also requires that some extraneous force must have set things in motion or else there would presently be no displacement at all and everything would be at rest.

5. Any chain of causal dependence, where the cause of one thing is conditional to the effect produced by another, cannot be infinite in past duration because the dependency of causation itself requires an independent cause for it to exist in the first instance.

Have submitted a new manuscript critical of attempts to suggest that the Homo genus need not be defined in terms of obligate terrestrial bipedalism because the australopiths already were engaged in this locomotion.